New Mutants Movie Will Bring a Young Adult Vibe to the X-Men Universe

The X-Men movie universe is starting to grow in big ways and with Deadpool a smash hit and Gambit in the works (though production has been delayed until later this year), you’re going to be seeing a lot more films branching off from the core series.

At the Star Wars Rebels season finale screening this week, I asked Simon Kinberg – who is an EP on Rebels, while also playing a key role as a producer on the X-Men films – for an update on one of those projects, The New Mutants.Last year it was revealed that Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) was attached to co-write and direct the film, based on the Marvel comic about a team of young X-Men in training.

Said Kinberg, of the current status of The New Mutants, “Josh Boone and his writing partner are working on the script. They're doing a really nice job of it, and it's a really cool one, because in many ways, like Deadpool was so different from the mainline X-Men movies, New Mutants… It’s maybe not as different as Deadpool, but it has its own unique, original voice to it."

Exit Theatre Mode

Added Kinberg, "That's the fun for me, working in the X-Men universe, creating these sort of standalone movies that have a different vibe to them. And New Mutants has more of a YA [Young Adult] vibe to it.”

As for the characters we might see in the film, Kinberg noted that when it came to X-Men and New Mutant-related characters the films haven’t used yet, “There's a very deep bench. There's a long, long list of names, and I'll tell you some of the names on that list I don't even know. That's how deep it goes.”

Previous X-Men movies have used characters associated with the New Mutants, including Warpath, Sunspot and, of course, Professor X, the team’s original mentor. Speaking to whether we might see any already-introduced characters from the X-Men movies in the New Mutants film, Kinberg remarked, “Traditionally, the New Mutants have some characters that cross over from the mainline X-Men movies. As we are going, I would say it's likely that you will see some familiar faces.”

I couldn’t help but mention to Kinberg that I had my own lifelong affection for the New Mutant character Magik/Illyana Rasputin and had my fingers crossed she’d make it into the film. Kinberg replied, with a grin, “It’s a great role… It would be a great role to cast.”